Chuck Murcko writes:
> It's my belief that if you have to redesign the CPU for the OS,
> then either the OS or the CPU sucks. And, sad to say, people will
> pay twice the price for far less than twice the performance...

Way less, if it's the P4 that we're talking about. Intel apparently
assumed that all new code would be compiled to use a new more rational
set of floating point instructions (part of SSE2, IIRC) and sacrificed
performance on code using the 8087 stack instructions to get the chip
out the door. So performance on any legacy code with substantial
floating point is horrid --- generally less than a P3 at a much lower
clock rate.